John Irving - In One Person

It was into this rock-’n’-roll-radio atmosphere of idle waiting, in the loneliness of Elaine Hadley’s dark-blue bedroom, where I introduced the idea of my wanting to fool around with her. It wasn’t that this was such a bad idea; it just wasn’t true. It’s not surprising that Elaine’s initial response was one of disbelief.

“You just said what ?” my friend Elaine asked.

“I don’t want to do or say anything that would endanger our friendship,” I told her.

“You want to fool around with me ?” Elaine asked.

“Yes, I do—a little,” I said.

“No . . . penetration, is that what you mean?” she asked.

“No . . . yes, that’s what I mean,” I said. Elaine knew that I had a little trouble with the penetration word; it was one of those nouns that could cause a pronunciation problem for me, but I would soon get over it.

“Say it, Billy,” Elaine said.

“No . . . going all the way,” I told her.

“But what kind of fooling around, exactly?” she asked.

I lay facedown on her bed and covered my head with one of her pillows. This must have been unacceptable to her, because she straddled my hips and sat on my lower back. I could feel her breathing on the back of my neck; she nuzzled my ear. “Kissing?” she whispered. “Touching?”

“Yes,” I said, in a muffled voice.

Elaine pulled the pillow off my head. “Touching what ?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Not everything, ” Elaine said.

“No! Certainly not,” I said.

“You can touch my breasts,” she said. “I don’t have any breasts, anyway.”

“Yes, you do,” I told her. She had something there, and I admit that I wanted to touch her breasts. (I confess to wanting to touch all kinds of breasts, especially small ones.)

Elaine lay next to me on the bed, and I turned on my side to look at her. “Do I give you a hard-on?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Oh, my God—it’s always so hot in this room!” she suddenly cried, sitting up. The colder the weather was outside, the hotter it was in those old dormitories—and the higher the floor you were on, the hotter it got. At bedtime, or after lights-out, the students were always opening their windows, albeit only a crack, to let a little cold air in, but the ancient radiators would keep cranking up the heat.

Elaine was wearing a boy’s dress shirt—white, with a button-down collar, though she never buttoned the collar, and she always left the top two buttons unbuttoned. Now she untucked the shirt from her jeans; she pinched the shirt between her thumb and index finger, and, holding it away from her stick-thin body, she blew on her chest to cool herself off.

“Do you have a hard-on now ?” she asked me; she’d opened the window a crack before lying down on the bed beside me.

“No—I must be too nervous,” I told her.

“Don’t be nervous. We’re just kissing and touching, right?” Elaine asked me.

“Right,” I said.

I could feel a razor-sharp draft of cold air from the cracked-open window when Elaine kissed me, a chaste little peck on the lips, which must have been as disappointing to her as it was to me—because she said, “Tongues are okay. French kissing is allowed.”

The next kiss was much more interesting—tongues change everything. There is a gathering momentum to French kissing; Elaine and I were unfamiliar with what to do about it. Perhaps to distract myself, I thought of my mother overseeing my wayward father kissing someone else . There’s a waywardness to French kissing, I remember thinking. Elaine must have needed to distract herself, too. She broke free from our kiss and breathlessly said, “Not the Everly Brothers again !” I’d been unaware of what was playing on the rock-’n’-roll station, but Elaine rolled away from me; reaching for her night table, she turned the radio off.

“I want to be able to hear us breathing,” Elaine said, rolling into my arms again.

Yes, I thought—breathing is very different when you’re French kissing someone. I lifted her untucked shirt and tentatively touched her bare stomach; she slid my hand up to her breast—well, to her bra, anyway—which was soft and small and fit easily in the palm of my hand.

“Is this a . . . training bra?” I asked her.

“It’s a padded bra,” Elaine said. “I don’t know about the training part.”

“It feels nice,” I told her. I wasn’t lying; the training word had triggered something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what I held in the palm of my hand. (I mean, how much of what I felt was her breast—or was it mostly the bra?)

Elaine, as if heralding what our future relationship would become, must have read my mind, for she said—as always, loud and clear—“There’s more padding than breast, if you want to know the truth, Billy. Here, I’ll show you,” she said; she sat up and unbuttoned the white shirt, slipping it off her shoulders.

It was a pretty bra, more pearl-gray than white, and when she reached behind her back to unfasten it, her bra seemed to expand. I had only a glimpse of her small, pointy breasts before she put her shirt back on; her nipples were bigger than any boy’s, and those darker-colored rings around the nipples—the areolae, another unpronounceable plural!—were almost as big as her breasts. But while Elaine was buttoning her shirt, it was her bra—now on the bed, between us—that captured my attention. I picked it up; the soft, breast-shaped pads were sewn into the silky fabric. To my surprise, I instantly wanted to try it on—I wanted to know what it felt like to wear a bra. But I was no more honest about this feeling than I’d been about those other desires I had withheld from my friend Elaine.

It was only the slightest deviation from the norm that signaled to me a fallen boundary in our emerging relationship: As always, Elaine had left the top two buttons of her boy’s dress shirt unbuttoned, but this time she’d also left the bottommost button unbuttoned. My hand slipped more easily under her untucked shirt; it was the real thing (what little there was of it) that fit so perfectly in my palm.

“I don’t know about you, Billy,” Elaine said, as we lay face-to-face on one of her pillows, “but I had always imagined a boy touching my breasts for the first time as messier than it actually is.”

“ Messier, ” I repeated. I must have been stalling.

I was remembering Dr. Harlow’s annual morning-meeting talk to us boys, concerning our treatable afflictions; I was recalling that “an unwelcome sexual attraction to other boys and men” fell into this dubiously curable category.

I must have repressed the annual morning-meeting presentation of Dr. Grau—“Herr Doktor” Grau, as we boys called Favorite River’s school psychiatrist. Dr. Grau gave us the same lunatic spiel every year—how we were all of an age of arrested development, “frozen,” the Herr Doktor said, “like bugs in amber.” (By our frightened expressions, we boys could tell that not all of us had seen bugs in amber—or even knew what they were.) “You are in the polymorphous-perverse phase,” Dr. Grau assured us. “It is only natural, at this phase, that you exhibit infantile sexual tendencies, in which the genitals are not yet identified as the sole or principal sexual organs.” (But how could we fail to recognize such an obvious thing about our genitals? we boys thought with alarm.) “At this phase,” Herr Doktor Grau continued, “coitus is not necessarily the recognizable goal of erotic activity.” (Then why did we think about coitus nonstop? we boys wondered with dread.) “You are experiencing pregenital libidinal fixations,” old Grau told us, as if this were somehow reassuring. (He also taught German at the academy, in the same unintelligible fashion.) “You must come talk to me about these fixations, ” the old Austrian always concluded. (No boy I knew at Favorite River admitted to having such fixations; no one I knew ever talked to Dr. Grau about anything !)